Pinwheel "Clock Man" short (lost animated short; 1970s-1980s)

"Clock Man" short (1970's/1980's)

Still renditions by Commander Santa.

Status

Lost/Existence Unconfirmed

First brought to mass online attention in 2012 by bungie.net Off-Topic forum (aka The Flood) user Commander Santa, was an alleged short stop-motion animation that had apparently first aired during Nickelodeon's Pinwheel in the early-to-mid 1980s (or even possibly sometime in the late 1970s, as early as 1977, as that was the year Pinwheel debuted).[1]

According to Commander Santa, the short involved a young boy laying in his bed, who gets snatched up by the "Clock Man", a discolored, unkempt entity that emerges from the wall clock above the child's bed at the stroke of midnight. The boy, after being taken on an eerie adventure, is subsequently returned to his room before sunrise.

An uncannily similar description of a scary Pinwheel short can be found within a 2002-2004 animationnation.com forum thread, (as recounted in a 2004 comment by user Michael W Howe), involving a young girl making a deal with a wizard, after losing her red shoes; the deal being that the wizard would replace the shoes, so long as the child told her mother about the extraordinary event. Incidentally, the girl decides not to tell her mother, to which the wizard responds by emerging out of her wall clock, snatching her up and demanding an explanation. She eventually agrees to make it up to the wizard by sewing stars to be placed in the night sky, before being returned to her mother, to whom she then recounts the entire experience.[2]

Artist's impression of the "Clock Man" wizard. Art by Gaucelm/Reynard.

While the two descriptions provided differ in many ways, they may very well be referring to the same piece of animation, given that things of such an obscure nature are often misremembered, especially if witnessed during childhood.

Although several other people claim to have seen the short, its validity has yet to be actually proven, with many writing off the "Clock Man" as a mere creepypasta (largely on account of an over-the-top comment made by Commander Santa, in which he suggests that Pinwheel used to hypnotise children, giving them visual hallucinations). There may yet be some truth to this short, however, especially given the huge gap between (what seems to be) the first and most recent online recounts of it, but until some form of solid proof emerges, we will never really know. It may be worth noting that a user of 4chan's /x/ board also apparently recalled the clip, citing the boy's name as Benjamin, though this too has never been confirmed.

Whether real or a hoax, no footage (either proven or alleged) from the short has ever emerged, the closest thing being a few still renditions as created by Commander Santa.

Update

On the Lost Media Wiki Discord, user "YoshiKiller2s" Said that his cousin had seen it multiple times, user "Notelu" posted a summary of what he said on the forums

"He recalls seeing Clock man 3 times. He does not remember much about it but what he does remember is him coming out of the clock and saying "You did not tell your mother" and had an Irish laugh (possibly made in Ireland?) He remembers clock man like everybody else, Big white eyes, Green skin, big toothy smile, and A bowler hat with a belt buckle(?) on it, and the girl had brown hair, a white gown with white dots on it, and black eyes, the bed sheets were blue. and Blue or White Slippers.

The Clock man comes out of the clock with a big thump and wakes up the kid with a Irish laugh, and says "You did not tell your mother" the kid tries to apologize but fails and she is taken away through the window and they go through a field and the girl has to help the Clockman with chores.

He says the room is very similar to Commander Santa's picture, but there were photos on the wall, and curtains on the window.

He says that it had very poor claymation.

During the day the kid had a hair band on and her hair was straight down, also there might have been a vase in the room with 2-3 flowers in it."

Seeing as this likely wasn't made in the UK, the next best thing would be to search up whatever we can in either a Scandavian language or an Eastern European language. First guess to do is to search this short's description or name up in Serbo-Croatian, since Pinwheel did air a fair number of Yugoslav shorts back then.